Three Important PR Lessons From This Week's Komen, Sierra Club Scandals

Amy Westervelt
, ContributorI cover innovation at the intersection of health & the environment.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

What is with the scandals in the nonprofit world this week? First there was the whole Susan G. Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood debacle and now here comes the Sierra Club, scrambling to explain how and why it now fights against the same natural gas industry it once happily took millions from. No matter which side of the issues you're on (abortion, in the case of Komen, and natural gas in the case of the Sierra Club), there are a few big communications lessons hiding in these stories, particularly for those involved in organizations or companies associated with a social cause or a socially responsible good or product.

Lesson #1: Get in Front of the Scandal In case you've been living under a rock for the last 48 hours, the upshot of the Komen mess is this: Komen decided to stop funding Planned Parenthood once its current grants run out; Planned Parenthood kicked up a fuss and told its supporters, who in turn went after Komen. It didn't take long for the story to surface of newly hired Komen senior VP of public policy, Karen Handel, clearly stating her pro-life beliefs and her opposition to Planned Parenthood during her gubernatorial run in Georgia, which only added fuel to the fire.

Komen waited over 24 hours to respond in any way, and finally came out with a statement indicating that it had pulled the grants as part of a new policy to not fund any organization under investigation. That statement was followed about 24 hours later with the explanation that Planned Parenthood also didn't meet the organization's new grant standards in other ways.

The Sierra Club, on the other hand, was right out in front of its little mess. Lucky for them the story broke not on the AP, like the Komen story, but on a small blog called Corporate Crime Reporter. Still, rather than waiting for its detractors to run with the story, the Club's executive director went to Time Magazine's Bryan Walsh directly and gave him the exclusive on it, then proceeded to masterfully pin the organization's overly cozy relationship with the natural gas industry on his predecessor, Carl Pope, without ever actually calling Pope out. Of course, it probably doesn't hurt that the Sierra Club's news is coming out in the midst of the Komen storm.

Lesson #2: Know What Story You Want to Tell, and Stick to It So far, Komen has let its opponents, and Planned Parenthood, control the story. Seemingly caught completely off-guard by the backlash, their entire strategy has been defense, and pretty poorly executed defense at that. The initial justification for the funding decision--that Komen is no longer funding organizations under investigation--only gave the organization's critics more fuel. Many opposed to the decision charged Komen with creating this policy with the sole intention of de-funding Planned Parenthood, which is forever being investigated in the various states in which it operates, investigations largely spearheaded by pro-life groups that take issue with the organization's abortion work. Planned Parenthood is currently being investigated under what many consider to be trumped-up charges by House Republican, Rep. Cliff Stearns. Today, Jeff Goldberg reported in the Atlantic that higher-ups in Komen had quit over the creation of the investigation policy, which is said to have been spearheaded by Handel. Since the policy was instituted in December, Planned Parenthood is the only grantee, out of over 2,000, that has been affected.

This evening, CEO and Founder Nancy Brinker told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell that Komen's decision had to do not only with the investigation, but also with new requirements and standards for grants that Planned Parenthood did not meet. She was promptly taken to task by not only Mitchell herself, who demanded a detailed accounting of how exactly Planned Parenthood had failed to meet Komen's standards, and by Senator Barbara Boxer, who claimed Brinker was trying to backpedal and revise history. "They clearly said yesterday that it was about this investigation, now today they're saying it's to do with new standards," she said. Brinker spent the entire interview on the defensive.

It's not the first time Komen has been caught off-guard by detractors. It seems every year there's at least one pink ribbon product affiliated with the organization that has critics seeing red--the KFC pink buckets, the Promise perfume with its endocrine disrupting chemicals, the pink ribbon Bibles sold by evangelicals. And yet each time, Komen seems to be scrambling to understand and respond to criticism.

Again, the Sierra Club is a foil to Komen, a lesson in communications done right. By telling the story first, to a journalist well versed on the background of the issue, and admitting some of the mistakes the organization has made, Brune has not only set the tone of the story but also diffused much of what his critics are bound to say. "The chapter groups and volunteers depend on the Club to have their back as they fight pollution from any industry, and we need to be unrestrained in our advocacy,” he told Walsh. “The first rule of advocacy is that you shouldn’t take money from industries and companies you’re trying to change.”

It might help that the Sierra Club is clearly an activist organization and thus knows its critics well and has spent years mastering the art of presenting a specific image and message in the media. Similarly, Planned Parenthood has always had a clear stance and has been forced to defend that stance on multiple occasions.

Komen, on the other hand, has always prided itself on being bi-partisan and non-political, which not only makes the hiring of Handel, and the firing of Planned Parenthood, as it were, more surprising to its supporters, but may also have made the organization less equipped to expect or handle the backlash. Although as nonprofit communications expert Kivi Leroux Miller told Politico yesterday, it's hard to believe that the response was a complete surprise to Komen staff. "They pretty much cut their fundraising support in half," Miller said. "I don’t think they meant to make a huge political statement, but it was extremely naïve of them to think this wasn’t hyper-political."

Lesson #3: It Goes Social Media, then Mainstream Media, then Your Own Website The social media world has been on fire for nearly three days now with people either praising or criticizing Komen, depending on which side of the abortion debate they're on, and meanwhile thanks to its email campaign--which launched the issue into public eye--Planned Parenthood has made more in the last 48 hours than it has in months. Planned Parenthood executive director Cecile Richards quickly made the rounds of all the big TV news shows and gave interviews to anyone who asked. Komen CEO Brinker opted instead to decline interviews, releasing her own canned video statement instead. Komen stayed off of Facebook and Twitter (except to delete negative comments) for over 24 hours. By the time Brinker finally took to the airways on Andrea Mitchell's show, anything she said looked like a scrambling defense.